Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Dollar Halloween is a new book of photographs by Wyatt Doyle, focusing on the glut of cheaply manufactured Halloween decorations, toys, and knick-knacks created for and sold in American dollar stores. Preview the limited edition hardcover in its entirety via the Issuu embed above. Doyle's introductory essay to the book follows:

Los Angeles is a dollar store town. With significant blocs of its population composed of recent immigrants, low-income laborers, and entertainment-industry cannon fodder—all working for peanuts—dollar stores help ensure the continued survival of the working poor by offering grocery essentials at a buck apiece. If you’ve got a dollar, you’ve got a dinner…or something, anyway, until a dinner comes along.

The ubiquity of the 99 Cents Only chain makes the brand the Starbucks of their weight class (at least in Los Angeles), and their high-ceilinged, well-lit interiors provide familiar and reassuring echoes of their more expensive cousins (unlike most smaller, ethnic, or independently owned discount shops).

When a medium-sized 99 Cents Only in my old neighborhood outgrew its location, the company opened a much larger store, barely a block south—only to retain the original location as well. Even with the roaring success of the new superstore, there was no discernable drop in business at the old location, just a few yards away. Both stores continue to thrive.

* * *

Halloween decorations are curious items to begin with. The trappings of the holiday are so deeply ingrained, so traditional, they’ve all but lost their meaning. A date or the time of year is enough to move us to festoon our homes with make-believe rotting corpse parts and an ever-growing variety of sparkly death totems.

And where there’s a need, or even a mild desire, a dollar store stands ready to fill it, for whatever you’ve got in your pocket. Come autumn, their aisles swell with an onslaught of flimsy window decorations and off-brand Halloween tchotchkes. Most made in China, few sturdy enough to survive a single use.

Plastic jack-o’-lanterns and fastener-hinged cardboard skeletons are familiar, but the uncontrollable compulsion to foist more and more stuff on each other leads to the introduction of dozens of ultimately disposable decorating ideas to the seasonal shelves each year. And if Walgreens wants to sell you their version for $9.95, you’d better believe there’s a factory in China crapping out something like it that’ll wholesale for pennies and still turn a profit.

The haste, disinterest, and cynicism in the products’ manufacture are often reflected in the product. At times the low production standards and cheap molds add a layer of unintentional deformed menace to an expression, or lend an accidental resemblance to some obscure movie monster; other items, the process renders unrecognizable. Thin, plaster skulls crusted with cheap sequins, possibly topped by a bat- or spider-shaped glob…plastic severed limbs, heads, and masks, their spray-on painted details applied out of register…armies of gaudy Grim Reaper figurines, familiar year-round from the windows of the city’s many Santeria botanicas…and occasional malformed, misshapen rejects that appear to have collided with another product somewhere down the assembly line. Most of it dusted with glitter, all of it junk. When you handle one, it leaves paint on your fingers. Throw it away, and bits are left behind.

I WATCHED THEM EAT ME ALIVE

The Men's Adventure Library's I Watched Them Eat Me Alive collects pulse-pounding pulp fiction and outrageous illustration art of man vs. beast in vivid full color! Edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, it's available as a 106-page softcover for just $9.95, and in a deluxe, expanded 126-page hardcover edition for $24.95. The expanded hardcover includes work by pantheon men’s adventure artist Samson Pollen and a long-lost tale of bloodthirsty crustaceans by SFWA Grand Master Robert Silverberg! Get it here.

THE LAST COLORING BOOK

MAP OF THE MOON EP

Map of the Moon delivers a volatile mix of zero-gravity noise pop and moon rock. Blissed, hazy shoegaze transmissions from space, synth rock and direct hi-energy indie pop, with uptempo rock and roll coming through on re-entry. Get the EP here.

BARBARIANS ON BIKES

Barbarians on Bikes is a different kind of release from The Men's Adventure Library. Oversized and all artwork, this one-of-a-kind visual archive rounds up three decades of vintage pulp magazine art featuring rowdy motorcycle action and outlaw biker gangs, most unseen since their original publication. With history and context by editors Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, plus an afterword by crime novelist Paul Bishop. The deluxe hardcover edition includes an additional 20 pages of biker pulp art. Barbarians on Bikes is big, bad, and untamed. Can you handle the ride?Buy it here.

SIXTY, GODDAMMIT

Josh Alan’s first album in 15 years. Can you dig it? Atomic acoustic blues-funk-rock. Sixty, Goddammit? Ya damn right.

A HANDFUL OF HELL

New from the Men's Adventure Library, editors Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle present A Handful of Hell by Robert F. Dorr.

Aviator, diplomat, and historian, Dorr was uniquely qualified to write for men’s adventure magazines, bringing sweat-and-blood, nuts-and-bolts authenticity to his stories of risk, combat, and sacrifice. Best known today for his highly regarded historical works, Dorr’s stories for the men’s pulps also drew from jaw-dropping true accounts, as action-packed as any imagined by his hard-boiled peers.

DOLLAR HALLOWEEN

Photographs by Wyatt Doyle, author of Stop Requested.

Every year, faces of death crowd the aisles of dollar stores: Skeletons, ghouls, and rubber body parts, all manufactured cheaply overseas and designed and destined for the homes of the working poor of Los Angeles and elsewhere. The result of several years' work for photographer Doyle, Dollar Halloween is a catalog of the annual exhibition.

I'VE GOT HEAVEN ON MY MIND

You don't have to have faith to love Reverend Raymond Branch! I've Got Heaven on My Mind features twelve contemplative, inspirational recordings, including a cover of the Velvet Underground's "Jesus," composed by Lou Reed for the band's eponymous 1967 LP.

I've Got Heaven on My Mind is recorded and mixed by Todd Burke, and is produced by Wyatt Doyle and Mike McGonigal. All sales go directly to Rev. Branch's service efforts in the community.

TEACHER TALES

For 40 years, Mr. Kessler has taught English in the Philadelphia school system the way he knows best: Keeping his head down, not making waves, and counting down the minutes before he's home enjoying a few generously poured martinis. But a series of new acquaintances and bad decisions in his final year before retirement brings his world crashing down around him--tragically and hilariously.

Teacher Tales, the savagely funny debut from novelist Richard Adelman, is available now. Buy it here.

CRYPTOZOOLOGY ANTHOLOGY

From the Men's Adventure Library, CRYPTOZOOLOGY ANTHOLOGY tears into 13 long-lost tales of fist-to-claw encounters with Bigfoot, sea monsters, the Yeti, and cryptids both notorious and obscure. With contributions from luminaries like Sir Arthur C. Clarke and John Keel, plus full-color reproductions of pulp artwork that accompanied the stories' original publication in classic men's adventure magazines.

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